German Pat. No. 816,807 describes a lettering guide comprising an elongate frame with a rectangular opening whose major dimension extends in a direction of a line of characters to be inscribed on the receiving surface, i.e. horizontally as is true in most instances and as will be assumed hereinafter. In a direction perpendicular thereto, i.e. vertical in the case of an upright surface, the frame opening has a width considerably exceeding the height of a line of characters; an elongate slider somewhat narrower than the frame opening is vertically displaceable therein between two limiting positions adjacent the horizontal frame members. The slider has a horizontally extending window which is bounded by two bars paralleling the major frame members and accommodates a rectangular template, also extending horizontally with its major dimension, which is guided in confronting longitudinal grooves of the bars and is formed with one or two rows of cutouts enabling the tracing of selected characters. With two rows of cutouts respectively representing lower-case and capital letters, a shift of the slider between its two limiting positions facilitates the tracing of letters from either row on a given line of the receiving surface. The frame also carries a pressure bar, normally held elevated above the slider by coil springs, from which a multiplicity of pins project downward to engage in respective holes of the template to index same in a working position; the holes are equispaced along the template and are in line with respective characters thereof. Thus, a user having traced one character in one of these working positions will be able to trace the next character in another working position so chosen that the tracings on the receiving surface will have uniform center-to-center spacing or pitch.
This type of uniformity, however, is not always desirable. Since some characters such as M and W are much wider than others such as I or l, consecutive narrower characters will have greater separation than wider ones. Furthermore, characters with two distinct apertures or "eyes" (such as B or 8) require plural cutouts for their tracing which necessarily appear on the template at different locations that must be successively brought into the selected writing position. The device described above does not provide for this possibility.